Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Modern man is frantically trying to earn enough to buy things he's too busy to enjoy.

I'd always rather be working - and you know what? My kids would rather me be working. If I stay at home, I'll only buy another car or spend their money.

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment - we're living inside commercials.

I try to educate people about materialism through my work. I try to show them real visual luxury.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

I think of how most people only get three weeks of vacation a year. And that, for me, seems like it would be really hard. My life feels like a vacation.

We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity.

The American people have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems.

The conversation of most middle-class Americans, we are told, revolves around consumption: what to buy, what was just bought, where to eat, the price of the neighbor's house, what's on sale this week, our clothes or someone else's, the best car on the market this year, where to spend a vacation. Apparently we can't stop eating, shopping, or consuming. Success is measured not in terms of love, wisdom, and maturity but by the size of one's pile of possessions.

We don't really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor's, and they're going on vacation that's slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand.

Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have an how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

Consumerism is, quite precisely, the consuming of life by the things consumed. It is living in a manner that is measured by having rather than being... and consumerism is hardly the sin of the rich. The poor, driven by discontent and envy, may be as consumed by what they do not have as the rich are consumed by what they do have. The question is not, certainly not most importantly, a question about economics. It is first and foremost a cultural and moral problem requiring a cultural and moral remedy.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?

...There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end... Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.

There's never a time when I'm not working. I don't take vacations.

I know many Europeans and I think many of them don't even believe me when I say that people in US don't have vacations. Obviously a lot of people do but there are many, tens of millions of people that don't and there's certainly no guarantee of a vacation. So paid time off is very valuable where people know they could get four or five weeks vacation, which is absolutely standard in Europe. Denmark has 6 weeks. So I think that's something that's very valuable, giving people time off.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital ... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

Making money, getting yourself status in this world is not everything at all. But it has become everything in America. That you really have to get going and keep up with the Jones'. Get a house and a car and other things. And pretty soon you're stymied. Things own you.

Consumerism is our national religion.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.